I’ve finally finished my flowered wrap skirt! I totally intended to have this done months ago, but summer was so busy! At least I finished my summer wrap skirt while it’s still technically summer, even if the weather has started to cool and it smells a lot like fall out there.
I’ve been sharing bits and pieces in other posts, but now I can finally show you the whole thing!
This was a huge multi-step process that involved several different techniques to pull off this final look.
I started by sewing the flounce together and stamping then dye painting the flowers (all 68 of them, and yes, I counted).
After sewing it all together I dyed the top portion of the skirt.
…Writing it out like that makes it sound a lot easier than it felt.
There were a lot of learning experiences with this piece. I haven’t done a lot with clothing, so trying to put together a skirt and following a pattern was a challenge. (Seriously, I feel like I’m reading a foreign language trying to follow those things!)
While painting the flowers I learned that dyes, especially purple, fade really quickly after coming in contact with soda ash. So I took a break to run this experiment to figure out a better way to paint with dyes. I mean, the experiment was really interesting and I learned a lot from it, but it meant that I had to spend another four hours repainting the flowers to give them their beautiful, bold purple. I’m not gonna lie, there was a moment where I looked at them and thought, “Well, it isn’t that bad. I could just leave it,” but I’m really glad that I did – the color is soooo much better.
And the top portion. I thought I was being soooo smart by tying off the flower section and only soaking the top portion in the soda ash before dyeing it, completely forgetting that water is going to wick through the fabric… So there I was, checking on the progress after a couple hours, horrifiedly realizing that the dye had spread all the way through the flower section, frantically pouring copious amounts of clear water over the sections I didn’t want dyed and desperately hoping that the dye hadn’t attached to the fabric. It ended up spreading farther than I’d wanted, but fortunately didn’t ruin the whole thing. I think I would have cried had that happened. Screwing up on the home stretch would seriously have sucked!
But at last, it is done. Not necessarily how I imagined it would turn out, but when working with dyes, sometimes you just have to accept that.
